SPOTLIGHT
March 2026
The Edit
The Daydream Issue
March arrives and winter is still here, refusing to take the hint. So we do what we always do this time of year — we stare out the window and let our minds go somewhere warmer.
This issue is for the trips still living in your head. The ones that feel almost too good to actually book, the ones you've been half-planning for years. Consider this the nudge.
THE DAYDREAM THE DAYDREAM
ON NEW BEGINNINGS, WINTER WINDOWS AND THE TRIPS WE KEEP ALMOST BOOKING
IIn my first month in New York, I was hit by two storms, which felt like a test I hadn't studied for. My apartment is still half-assembled in the way new places are the right objects in slightly wrong positions, a neighborhood that's starting to feel familiar but isn't quite mine yet. I've been here long enough to know my coffee order and not much else.
What I have been doing, in between unpacking boxes and learning which subway entrance to avoid, is staring out the window at the snow and thinking about warm water. Specifically, about all the trips I've been meaning to take. The ones that live in that particular corner of the brain reserved for things that feel almost too good to actually do.
I think this time of year does that to people. March arrives and winter is still here, technically, refusing to acknowledge the calendar. And something about being in a new city — starting over, in the best possible sense makes you think about all the versions of your life that are still ahead of you.
Which is how this issue came together. Not around a trend or a season or a destination that's having a moment, but around a feeling. The particular restlessness of late winter. The emails I get from clients that start with "this is probably crazy but..." — and then describe exactly the trip they should take. The gorilla trek they've been putting off for a decade. The train journey through the Italian seaside. The ship that does the packing and unpacking for you.
None of these are crazy. That's sort of the point.
This chapter mine, yours, whatever version you're in the middle of deserves the trips that match it. The ones that feel significant. The ones you'll still be talking about years from now, long after you've forgotten what was stopping you. I'm here when the daydream is ready to become an itinerary.
THERECOMMENDATION
FortheTripsStillLivinginYourHead
There's a particular kind of daydream that only happens in later winter - especially when you were welcomed by, not one, but two massive snowstorms in your first month in the new city you now call home. Not the productive kind not the "let me research boutique hotels in Paris" kind. The other kind. The one where you're in a meeting or staring at a weather app showing yet another 24-degree day and your mind just...goes. Somewhere warm. Somewhere implausible. Somewhere that requires a conversation that starts with okay but what if we actually did it?
I've been having that daydream on a loop. And maybe you have too the half-formed plans that live in a saved folder or a notes app or just somewhere in the back of your head. The ones that start with "this is probably crazy but I've always wanted to..." It's not crazy. It's just winter doing what winter does: making the distance between where you are and where you'd rather be feel very, very concrete.
So this month's recommendation isn't about smart timing or shoulder season strategy. It's about the trips worth taking seriously the ones you've been half-planning in your head for years and haven't quite said out loud yet. Three of them. All different. All real.
The One That Stays With You
GORILLASAFARI RWANDA&UGANDA
Picture this: You're in Rwanda or Uganda at dawn, moving quietly through dense forest and then suddenly you're sitting ten meters from a mountain gorilla family going about their morning juveniles tumbling over each other, a silverback doing absolutely nothing and commanding the entire clearing anyway. The encounter lasts exactly one hour. People never quite have the words for the hour after. The lodges that position you well for this Bisate, Singita Kwitonda, One&Only Gorilla's Nest are extraordinary in their own right. This is not a rough trip. It's a wild one. There's a difference.
The One Where You Never Unpack
LUXURYEXPEDITIONCRUISE
Aman at Sea. Four Seasons yacht. A floating world where you wake up anchored somewhere different every morning and the hardest decision of the day is whether to go ashore or stay on the sundeck. The new generation of luxury expedition ships has genuinely closed the gap between hotel and vessel the cabins are proper rooms, the food is serious and the itineraries go places that land travel simply can't reach. Greek islands to Turkey. Japan's inland sea. The Galápagos. Antarctica. The fantasy here isn't just the destination it's the continuity. One beautiful context, moving slowly through the world, no airports after the first one. It's the trip for people who hate packing and love waking up surprised.
The spotlight edit
The One that feels like Living Inside A FiLM
LUXURYTRAINJOURNEYS
The category is luxury train. The experience is something else entirely and there are more versions worth knowing about than most people realize. The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express is the original fantasy: 1920s Art Deco carriages, French countryside giving way to Swiss mountain passes, service so seamless your glass is never empty long enough to notice. La Dolce Vita Orient Express is a different proposition 1960s Milanese glamour, Heinz Beck's three-Michelin-star menus, itineraries from a single overnight in Tuscany to five days Rome to Istanbul. The Belmond Royal Scotsman is Highland drama, whisky tastings, scenery that makes you put your book down and just look. These are three worth starting with. The question from there isn't whether this trip is for you. It's which version.
The spotlight edit
SPOTLIGHT SELECTS
THISMONTH’SCAREFULLY CONSIDEREDRECOMMENDATIONS
The Setting
THESEYCHELLES
Massive granite boulders rising from powder-soft sand, water in shades that don't have good names yet, beaches that look professionally styled and somehow aren't. Anse Source d'Argent on La Digue is the one everyone photographs, but the Seychelles rewards slow exploration the kind where you hire a bike, get slightly lost, and find a cove that's entirely yours for an afternoon. This is the daydream that looks exactly like the daydream.
PATINAMALDIVES,FARI ISLANDS
Where the Seychelles is dramatic and textured, the Maldives is pure, uninterrupted calm. Patina Fari Islands gets the balance exactly right design-forward without being cold, genuinely all-inclusive without feeling like a resort conveyor belt. The overwater villas are the obvious choice but the beach pool villas are the quieter, better argument. Either way you're waking up to water so clear it looks like a rendering. It isn't.
Just guitar and voice, recorded in a single session in New York. Veloso covers his own classics alongside Cole Porter and Lennon/McCartney and somehow makes all of it sound like it was written on the same afternoon in the same warm room somewhere you'd very much like to be. Put it on during the part of winter when you're done with winter. It will do something useful to your mood. CAETANOVELOSO—CAETANO
The Spark
The Staple
SLIMAARONS:APLACEINTHE
SUN
The definitive coffee table book for daydream season. Aarons spent decades photographing the leisure class at play pool parties in Palm Springs, yachts off the Amalfi coast, terraces in Capri and the result is a document of a particular kind of ease that makes you want to immediately book something. It has lived on more travel advisors' desks than any other book for a reason. Beautiful to look at. Quietly motivating.
SUMMERTIME—DAVIDLEAN (1955)
Katharine Hepburn, alone in Venice, chasing something she can't quite name. Shot on location in a city that has never looked more alive, it's less a romance than a meditation on wanting on the particular bravery of showing up somewhere beautiful by yourself and refusing to wish you weren't. Consider it required viewing for daydream season and a useful reminder that the trip doesn't have to be perfect to be exactly right.
ON MY RADAR ONMY RADAR
WHAT I'M TRACKING, BOOKING AND PAYING ATTENTION TO THIS MONTH
AMANVARI — BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO. OPENING THIS SPRING.
Aman's first property in Mexico and it's exactly what you'd expect from a brand that has never once opened something ordinary. Eighteen casitas on the East Cape of Baja where desert meets the Sea of Cortez meets a river estuary elevated for views, spare and beautiful in the way only Aman interiors are. The spa includes a contemporary temazcal, which is either reason enough to go or at least a good excuse. It sits within the Costa Palmas estate alongside a Four Seasons, a Robert Trent Jones II golf course, and a private marina, so the surrounding infrastructure is already there. Eighteen rooms means this fills fast. Worth getting on the radar now.
THE BEAUTY TRIP TO SEOUL IS HAVING A MOMENT.
Korea has become the world's most compelling destination for beauty-obsessed travelers not for the products you can order online but for the experiences you can't. Hanbang rituals rooted in decades of ginseng research. Scalp treatments that feel like a full system reset. Immersive flagship experiences that are part spa, part museum, part cultural education. The kind of trip where you come home looking noticeably different and slightly unable to explain why. Spring is a particularly good time to go, and if it's been quietly living on your list, this is a reasonable nudge.
MALTA. FINALLY, NONSTOP.
Delta is launching the first-ever nonstop flight from JFK to Malta this June which sounds like a small logistics update but is actually a meaningful shift. Malta has been beloved by Europeans for years and criminally overlooked by Americans, largely because getting there required a connection. That friction is gone. Three hundred days of sunshine, Michelin-starred dining, ancient temples and more UNESCO World Heritage Sites per square mile than almost anywhere on earth all now reachable without a layover. Valletta alone is worth the flight. If it's been sitting quietly on your list, this is the nudge. The spotlight edit
